Chuckling, he told them about the Bible argument that had been their nightly staple for thirty-five years.
“We never could get together on salvation,” he said, “nor sin either. Six nights out of seven we’d get into it over one or the other. Thirty-five years that went on. After the first year or two I doubt we really listened to one another, but we got hot about it, listening or not. One night I got so mad I took off around the house and walked into a clothesline pole. Knocked myself flat. Mary thought it served me right.” He paused a minute to light a cigarette.
“The first time I ever really gave Mary’s side of the argument much thought was a night or two after her funeral. I was sitting out here all primed to argue and there wasn’t nobody to argue with. Since then I’ve been kinda making up her part. In a way it’s even better than having her here. I always win the argument and there ain’t no way she can get revenge on me at the breakfast table.
“I got to admit the quality of the biscuits has declined, though,” he added quietly.
He went on and told other stories, anecdotes about wounds and arguments, dances, frights, misunderstandings and exploding pressure cookers—selecting for them a kind of anthology of scenes from his decades of married life. After a while it seemed to Patsy that he was delivering an elegy, probably the only one he ever spoke. His voice was calm and quite firm, as if its tone had long ago been purified by whatever disappointment, loneliness, or grief he had felt in that place, on that high-roofed old porch, alone with the night breeze and the dark pastures round.
Listening hurt Patsy more than the telling hurt Roger. A woman whose name was Rosemary had been alive and was dead—had sat where she sat and was gone. The old man sitting behind her had lived with the woman for almost forty years, had courted her, eaten her food, sat on that same porch with her thousands of nights, had fought with her, taken her places, made love to her. It was hard for her to imagine the people of older generations making love, but she knew they must have. And then one day without knowing it they did that act and each common act for the last time, rose from bed a last time, went to the morning’s toilet, ate, spoke, rode the roads they had known, left their friends without being aware that they were leaving them, argued for the last time, touched for the last time, and, for the last time, were thrilled or hurt. Thinking about it, Patsy was wrenched with sadness, and she bent her head and put her face into the skirt of her dress and cried. She was very quiet about it and Roger went on talking and no one noticed that she was crying.
“Yeah, a lot happens in a lifetime,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “I roped an eagle once when I was a crazy young feller. I was batching out near Van Horn. Came riding out of a gully and there was an eagle eating a dead sheep. I had my rope off, sort of practicing, like a young feller will, and I shot the spurs to the old pony I was riding and caught the eagle when he was about four feet off the ground. You think that wasn’t a may-lay. I finally threw my rope off and let him go, or me and the horse would have got clawed to death, I guess. It’s a wonder he let us escape, anyway. Seen a lot of boys rope coyotes but I never heard of anybody else roping an eagle.”
He stood up and yawned. “Speakin’ of coyotes, you-all can stay up and listen to them if you want to. I’m going to bed.”
He went in and they waited awhile and heard no coyotes and Patsy stood up. “Let’s go in,” she said. It seemed to her that the porch belonged to other people. Jim was agreeable because he wanted to make love. The stories had left Patsy feeling tender and she wanted to too, but found out that she hurt. “Ooch,” she said. Her breath sounded pained when Jim began to move.
“What?”
“I guess I do have a little infection.”
But she wouldn’t let him withdraw. She was only a little raw and they were not in disharmony. “Too bad for you,” Jim said fondly, later. “You probably drink too many Cokes, or something.”
After they were quiet they heard a long thin howl from far out in the pastures. “I think that’s a coyote,” Jim said. The howl came at intervals, like a call. Jim soon slept and Patsy got up and started a bath. She came back to the bedroom and sat by the window listening to the coyotes while it ran. She soaked herself and put on a gown, wishing she were in Houston and could see her gynecologist. Jim was extraordinarily nice to be with when he was asleep, she felt. He turned in the bed and made a sort of tropic shift toward her body. She reached down and straightened the tangled sheet and lay beside him on her stomach, wondering about Rosemary Wagonner.
The next morning, while Jim was loading the Ford and Roger attending to his cows and chickens, she sneaked into the other bedroom and looked at the picture of Rosemary that stood on the brown wooden bureau—an oval picture, apparently made in the twenties, of a young woman looking sideways, her hair drawn smoothly back. She wore a dark dress that seemed to match her hair. Her features were clean, her expression a little reserved, a little proud. The room she had lived in so long had a fireplace and a bed, a woodbox under the window, a closet, and a bureau with a small square mirror on top. There was no picture of Roger. On the wall was a calendar issued by a vaccine company. It showed a herd of steers watering at a river, with two cowboys on horses watching them.
Jim had not shaved, and while he was about it Patsy went out and sat on the stone storm cellar with Roger. A couple of speckled hens pecked in the bare dirt outside the yard gate.
“What’s this about Jim goin’ back to school?” Roger asked. “I thought he was done out.”
“This would be graduate school. A simple B.A. isn’t worth much any more.”
Roger shook his head. “Folks in my day couldn’t take school like you young folks can. You couldn’t have got me to go back for love nor money, and I never even got out of grade school.”
“I don’t know how serious he is about it,” Patsy said. “He’s only been talking about it two weeks. It can’t work out any worse than photography, as far as I’m concerned.” The morning sun was already hot on the back of her neck and she could imagine how it was going to be when they got to Houston.
“Well, at least it would save wear and tear on tires,” Roger said. “Might as well be optimistic.”
Soon Jim came out and they all went to the car. “Do me a favor, please,” Patsy said to Roger after kissing him on the cheek. “Come and see us sometime when you don’t have ninety things to do. We’ve visited you twice—now it’s your turn.”
“Try to, first chance I get,” he said. He took his hat off and ran his hand through his white hair and stood watching them as they drove away. Bob followed the Ford until it crossed the cattle guard and began to raise dust on the powdery road.
“I’ll bet he never comes,” Jim said. “He told me the other night that he hadn’t been farther away than Fort Worth in fifteen years.”
“But then he didn’t have me to come and see,” Patsy said. “I flirt with him and no one else does.”
“How would you know?”
“A femme fatale always knows,” she said archly. “You don’t think I know how to flirt, do you?”
“Not if you pick my elderly uncle to flirt with.”
“He’s a lovely man,” she said. “I like everything about him. Anyway, the beauty of my flirting is that it’s whimsical. I flirted with Pete Tatum too.”
“It doesn’t seem to have driven him mad with desire,” Jim said a little coldly. He had been troubled by the blown kiss. Also, he was in an intent driving mood and wished Patsy would go to sleep so he could enjoy the country and the smooth almost trafficless road.
“I guess it didn’t,” Patsy said, wondering. She became solemn for a moment. “Though I don’t know how you would know.”
The road ran south, through a country of low hills. For a time the hills were grassy and lightly treed with mesquite, but then the mesquite gave way to stubby post oak. White thunderheads were blowing south too, small morning thunderheads as swift as birds almost. She looked with delight at the morning and wondered about Pet
e. He really had desired her, at least for a little while. It was strange that it should matter, but it had. He had seemed to notice something about her that no one else had noticed. She looked at Jim. He had been avoiding barbershops and his blond hair was the longest it had ever been. He was intent on driving and wasn’t noticing her at all, and she had the feeling that he had never noticed whatever it was about her that Pete had noticed and wanted.
Then it slipped from her mind. It was pleasant to think about being in Houston. She could go for walks with Emma Horton, see real foreign movies again, read Punch in the Rice library, and have a baby and be settled. But when they had driven thirty miles in silence, Jim not once looking at her, she remembered Pete again. She was not annoyed with Jim exactly, but some feminine demon in her demanded its due. She smiled to herself and looked out the window.
“We even held hands once,” she said, taking off her headband and letting her hair blow.
“With Pete?” Jim said, forgetting about the driving.
She nodded when he looked at her. She looked demure and clean and sweet, but her mouth was inscrutable and her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.
“You’re putting me on,” he said.
“No. We held hands.”
“Why, for god’s sake? Did he make a pass at you or something?”
“No,” she said sweetly. “I was just practicing flirting.”
Jim felt very bothered, as much by Patsy’s manner as by the fact that for some reason she had held hands with Pete Tatum. They had fought before and she had taunted him before, but never quite that way. She had always taunted him about his deficiencies, never about her possibilities. It made him feel awkward. He had a feeling he should just keep quiet, and he did keep quiet for a few miles. Patsy sat calmly, happy with the morning.
“When was this?” he asked finally.
“In Cheyenne, the day I was there.”
“Oh,” he said, relieved. He had been imagining some darker context. He looked at her again and remembered that, after all, she was not a femme fatale but just a lovely girl with a soft heart.
“Why do you say ‘oh’ in that superior way?” She lowered her sunglasses and looked at him severely over the rims.
“You were just being sympathetic,” he said. “I know you. You want me to think you’re a seductress or something. Actually you just enjoy comforting people.”
“True. I do like to comfort people. There are all sorts of ways.” She put her sunglasses back on and looked out at the low hills.
“I think I just did it to see how it felt,” she added.
Jim let it rest, trying to imagine the scene. He was almost able to convince himself that her sympathetic nature accounted for it.
“I’m glad you picked him to practice on, if you had to practice,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone who’s less your type.”
Patsy didn’t reply. The demon had had its due and she was not in a mood to needle her husband. She rolled her window partway up and fiddled contentedly with the ends of her hair. After a while she picked up Love among the Cannibals.
“I do like long books,” she said. “With lots of short books strewn along the way. How many volumes is The Golden Bough?”
“A dozen or so.”
“Let’s get it,” she said. “Could we? It might get me through my twenties.”
19
ELEANOR LAY ON HER BED reading about Peru. The midsummer sun turned the patio white and hot by seven in the morning, and she normally spent her mornings in the long cool open bedroom, reading and drinking iced tea with lots of lemon in it. She had traveled a good deal in Central and South America, but for some reason had never been to Peru. In September she always traveled, September to November, usually, and Peru seemed a possibility. For some reason she liked the ranch best in the hard seasons, in July and August, when the pastures shimmered and the cowboys were dark-shirted with sweat at the end of the day. And she liked it too in January and February, when everything was dry and bare and gray-brown. Then northers sang around the barns and thousands of geese fed in the wheatfields. In the spring and in the fall she became restless, unable to be still, uninterested in the ranch and the ranch work and money and Texas, and she left. Lima had a lovely name.
The phone rang and she quietly picked up her receiver and listened to Lucy, her private barricade.
“A mister who?”
“A Mr. Percy.”
“Does Miss Guthrie know you?”
“What do you mean, know me? What kind of a question is that? Of course she knows me. I’m her symbolic husband.”
“Miss Guthrie ain’t got no husbands, of no kind. What is your business?”
“Never mind, Lucy,” Eleanor said. “His business is foul, but I’ll talk to him.”
There was an aggrieved silence from Lucy, and then she hung up.
“This is a surprise.”
“I’m desperate,” Joe Percy said. “I finally managed to weasel your phone number out of our cowboy friend. He’s here with me, by the way.”
“My phone number is no secret,” she said. “Just call Texas, they’ll put you right through. Why are you desperate? Where are you?”
“Ultima Thule,” he said. “That’s part of my desperation. I believe the name of the town is Boise. It’s in Idaho.”
“I’ve heard of it. How do you happen to be there?”
“I’m observing Sonny in his natural habitat. Last night he was apparently magnificent. Made an unheard of score riding a bull. Very competent man. We’re making a movie next summer after all and I’ve got to write it in the meantime.”
“Why not this summer? There’s plenty of it left.”
“Not possible. Wheels don’t turn that fast in L.A. these days.”
“Is Boise fun?”
“For rabbits, maybe. If I could fuck rabbits it might be fun for me. I don’t think there are five women in all Idaho.”
“Must be nice for the five,” Eleanor said. “Why did you call?”
“Partly because I miss you and mostly because I was coerced.”
“I see. He wants to talk too, in other words.”
“Precisely.”
“He doesn’t know about our symbolic marriage, I take it?”
“Nope. Wasn’t listening. Want to come to Boise?”
“No. I was thinking of going to Lima soon. Know anybody there?”
“Not sure. Conceivably. You’ll have to change planes in L.A., you know.”
“Not if I go to Mexico first. I’m not at the stage of making plans. What does Sonny want?”
“He wants you to lease us a tiny corner of your ranch to make our film on. We’re going to film in Texas. He doesn’t think we’d be in the way much.”
“He knows me better than that,” Eleanor said. “That possibility is out, and that’s final.”
“Well, sorry,” Joe said. “I didn’t think it was such a good idea, anyway. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You didn’t. You can get a location easily enough. All the small ranchers in the state are broke. Go to the Panhandle. You can lease all you want of it. But you can’t come here.”
“Would we corrupt the cowboys?”
“You certainly would. Is he awake?”
“It’s hard to say. He’s not in bed.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
There was a pause as Joe Percy searched for words. “Okay,” he said. “Nice speaking with you. Buzz me if you do pass through.”
“You have a very appealing voice,” she said. “I miss you.”
Joe sighed. “I don’t understand Texas women,” he said.
“Sure you do.”
“What do you do down there in your kingdom?”
“I read and I give orders.”
“The opposite of me. I write and I take orders. We’d complement one another. I think Mr. Sonny Shanks, World’s Champion Cowboy and soon to be the idol of millions of popcorn consumers, would like to talk to you.”
“Okay.
Call me when you don’t have company. We can exchange tidbits of wisdom.”
“I will.”
There was a longer pause. “Mornin’,” Sonny said. “How’s the grassfire situation down in Texas?”
“Under control.”
“Going to lease us some land?”
“Of course not.”
“Joe’s whistling. You must have been friendlier to him than you are to me.”
“He’s more polite than you are.”
There was the sound of an ice cube being crunched. “Why not lease us some? Be good publicity. You could have your picture taken with me. We could get some rumors going again.”
“No, thanks. My father would not have approved of his ranch being used as a movie set.”
“The hell he wouldn’t. He’d have taken the money and spent it on whiskey.”
“I can afford all the whiskey I want.”
Sonny was silent for several seconds. “Want to come to Denver next week?”
“Why?”
“Just to visit.”
“I’m not in a traveling mood.”
“Maybe I’ll visit you. I always liked Texas in August. It’s warm.” “You’d be welcome.”
He chuckled. “I was wondering if you still love me,” he said. “I’ve been wondering about that lately.”
“Did I love you once?”
“You acted like it.”
That was an understatement, Eleanor thought. “I’m not planning to leave before mid-September,” she said. “Come any time. Are you winning much?”
“Yeah. Hurt my knee again in Laramie. My back hurts.”
“I’ll rub it for you,” she said. “When do you think you might be coming?”
“Oh, maybe week after next.”
“Drive carefully.”
“Always do. Tell Lucy hi.”
Eleanor hung up and lay on the bed on her stomach for a while, not thinking of Peru. After a time Lucy shuffled in frowning.
“Miss Eleanor, who was that man?”
“Sonny.”
“No, ma’am. The one I talked to. What did he mean, you symbolic husband?”
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